Ukrainian Special Operations Forces struck the Omsk oil refinery almost 2,500 km from Ukraine's border — far beyond the Ural Mountains — the first time the war has reached the Siberian plant, and the last of Russia's 11 biggest gasoline producers to come under Ukrainian fire, the General Staff reported. The attack capped an overnight wave on 6 July that set oil facilities burning from Russia's Baltic coast to occupied Crimea. Air-raid sirens sounded in Chelyabinsk Oblast for the first time since the full-scale war began.

Special Operations Forces close the list of Russia's gasoline giants

Ukraine's General Staff said Special Operations Forces units hit the Omsk refinery in Omsk Oblast, recording an impact and a subsequent fire, with the damage still being assessed. Preliminary data pointed to the ELOU-AVT-11 primary oil processing unit, which has a design capacity of 8.4 million tons of crude a year.

The General Staff called Omsk the most powerful refinery in Russia, processing over 21 million tons annually with one of the country's highest refining depths at about 99%, and the last of Russia's 11 largest gasoline producers to be struck by Ukrainian forces. The plant makes high-octane gasolines, Euro-5 diesel, and TS-1 and RT jet fuel, along with petrochemicals and industrial oils — and supplies the Russian occupation army, the General Staff noted.

Astra's analysis, meanwhile, noted that other assessments rank the plant below the Kirishi and Achinsk refineries, and confirmed this was the first attack on the facility ever.

Earlier, Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+ reported that the first hit landed on the AVT-11 unit — the heart of the plant. At least two spots burned, and footage suggested nobody vented the system pressure before the strike hit two primary processing units. NASA FIRMS satellites recorded fires at both the AVT-10 and AVT-11 units.

The Omsk plant accounts for roughly 10% of all Russian oil refining, and by various estimates covers over 50% of the Siberian Federal District's motor fuel needs. Dnipro OSINT confirmed that modernized FP-1 drones hit the technological columns of the ELOU-AVT-11 unit more than 2,500 km from the border.

Omsk Oblast Governor Vitaly Khotsenko claimed that several drones reached the city's northern industrial hub while air defenses kept repelling the attack, without naming the refinery. Half an hour earlier he had claimed drones were destroyed over the oblast.

Yaroslavl's Slavneft-YANOS burns again

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) confirmed its drones attacked the Yaroslavl refinery and the Yaroslavl oil-pumping dispatch station the same night, with explosions and smoke recorded at the plant. Exilenova+ reported the refinery hit, with NASA FIRMS data confirming the fire.

Yaroslavl Oblast Governor Mikhail Yevraev claimed a drone attack on the region and blocked traffic toward Moscow near the plant from roughly 04:00 to 07:33, never naming what burned. Astra's OSINT analysis showed smoke rising over the Slavneft-YANOS site.

Ukrainian drones have struck it repeatedly this year — on 28 June, 19 May, 8 May, and 26 April, among other dates. The repeated hits helped push gasoline rationing into St. Petersburg by June. The refinery sits over 700 km from Ukraine's border.

Baltic ports and Kaluga hit the same night

The SBU also confirmed a successful strike on the oil-loading terminal of the Vysotsk sea port in Leningrad Oblast, disabling two oil-loading stenders and hitting three tanks with petroleum products. Ukrainian drones already set a fire near Vysotsk in April. The SBU's drones struck the Pervyi Zavod refinery in Kaluga Oblast too, sparking a fire.

The General Staff added hits on the NOVATEK-Ust-Luga complex near Slobodka and the permanent base of Russia's 26th Missile Brigade near Luga in Leningrad Oblast. Ukraine has battered Russia's Baltic export network since March, at times halting up to half of the petroleum exports flowing through it. Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko claimed 56 drones were downed by 08:40, admitting infrastructure damage at the Luga training ground and near the Ust-Luga and Vysotsk ports.

Kerch terminal hit, first siren in Chelyabinsk

In occupied Kerch, the overnight strike hit TES-Terminal-1 — one of the largest light petroleum transshipment complexes on the Crimean peninsula, the General Staff reported. The city's port and military infrastructure have taken repeated Ukrainian strikes within the campaign to isolate the occupied peninsula.

Overnight on 28 June, Ukraine struck two Russian oil refineries hundreds of kilometers apart, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. A large fire broke out at the Slavyansk plant in Krasnodar Krai, a key fuel supplier for occupied Crimea, while a second strike reached a top-five refinery near Yaroslavl, far to the north.

A "very fat target" near Crimea

The Slavyansk Oil Refinery, run by Slavyansk-EKO, sits at Slavyansk-na-Kubani, about 300 kilometers from the front. Ukraine struck it overnight, and a large fire broke out, the monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. Locals said the storage tanks were burning, Supernova+ noted. Russia's Astra channel placed the blaze on the refinery grounds, geolocating footage shot from Shkolna Street about 1.8 kilometers away.

The refinery is one of Russia's largest independent plants, with a capacity of about 5.2 million tons of crude a year, though 2023 throughput was closer to 4.19 million. It accounts for roughly 9% of refining in Russia's Southern Federal District and holds about 74 storage tanks of varying size. Ukraine has hit it this year, most recently on 2 June, and earlier in January.

NASA's FIRMS satellite system flagged the Slavyansk fire early today local time and detected a separate possible blaze at the "Slavyanskaya" oil-stabilization and gas-treatment unit nearby, Exilenova+ reported.

A second strike near Yaroslavl

Far to the north, Ukraine reached a refinery in Yaroslavl Oblast, about 700 kilometers from the border, Zelenskyy confirmed. Monitoring channels identified it as Slavneft-YANOS, one of Russia's five largest plants, with a capacity of about 15 million tons a year, the Moscow Times reported. The plant was last struck on 22 May.

Yaroslavl's governor reported a drone threat overnight, and then a temporary closure of routes toward Moscow, and Russia's aviation regulator briefly shut the local Tunoshna airport. Officials gave no account of any damage at the plant; monitors shared only a photo of a distant smoke column above the city.

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"Long-range sanctions"

Zelenskyy tied both strikes to Ukraine's wider campaign. 

"Our long-range sanctions reached two oil refineries in Russia," he wrote, marking Constitution Day. 

Each deep strike, he said, cuts the resources feeding Russia's war machine and brings another step toward peace.

Ukrainian drones struck an oil depot in the Cossack village of Poltavskaya in Russia's Krasnodar Krai overnight on 16 June, setting off a fire. Russian regional authorities again attributed the blaze to falling debris from intercepted drones — the explanation they have offered after earlier strikes.

The depot is not a refinery.It takes in fuel from regional plants, including Lukoil facilities, and feeds it to filling stations across Krasnodar Krai. Those are the same networks that started running dry in early June, when Krasnodar followed Crimea into gasoline shortage.

A depot feeding a region already short

The operational headquarters said no one was hurt, that 32 personnel and seven units of equipment were fighting the fire, and that a local road had been closed. Poltavskaya sits about 80 km west of the regional capital and roughly 385 km from the front line.

By 11 June, gasoline shortages had spread to at least 25 Russian oblasts and six occupied Ukrainian ones, with rationing reaching Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukrainian drones hit Russian refineries 16 times in May, the highest monthly total of the war.

"A full-fledged fuel crisis is beginning to form in Russia," Finam strategist Yaroslav Kabakov wrote in a note cited by Moscow Times on 15 June. The shock, he said, now comes "from the supply side" — not from seasonal demand or market speculation.

Subsidies, then weaker fuel

Moscow has tried to spend its way through. Oil companies took in 700 billion rubles ($9.7 billion) in subsidies across April and May. The Energy Ministry stood up a task force on 8 June. In June, the government let refiners cut quality, permitting Euro-3 gasoline in place of Euro-5.

Neither the subsidies nor the lower-grade fuel rebuilds a refinery a drone has hit, and the strikes have not stopped. Krasnodar Krai governor Veniamin Kondratyev called the shortage "artificial hype." Residents mocked him under his own Telegram post. The depot that burned at Poltavskaya was one of the places that fuel was supposed to pass through on its way to the pumps.

A second Krasnodar target the night before

Poltavskaya was the second oil facility hit in Krasnodar Krai in two nights. Drones struck the Kavkaz port in the Temryuk district overnight on 14–15 June, the Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported.

A fire broke out at the port's oil terminal, confirmed by NASA's FIRMS satellite system. The Kavkaz depot helps supply fuel to occupied Crimea and parts of the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk oblasts.

Those are the regions where Russia has been hauling gasoline to the front in the trunks of civilian cars.

A separate blow to crude exports

Ukraine has also gone after the export end of the chain. On 14 June, the Special Operations Forces said they had sabotaged the Palkino pumping station in Yaroslavl Oblast, working with the Russian partisan group Chornaya Iskra (Black Spark).

The station feeds the Surgut–Polotsk pipeline that moves Siberian crude toward the Baltic export terminal at Primorsk. Inside Russia, the group wrote, "the Hunger Games for gasoline are starting."

A Planet Labs satellite image published by Radio Liberty, dated 15 June, showed a fire at the station.